Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Learming about alarms.

Operator alarms are essential for running any process plant. They alert the operators early to developing situations, allowing the plant to keep running and minimizing downtime while producing sellable material efficiently despite disturbances, mechanical deterioration and unforeseen events.

In order to achieve this, alarms have to be properly positioned at the edges of normal operation, and many plants find themselves visiting the same limits again and again over years, performing repeated alarm rationalization exercises, but never getting real improvement for more than a few months.

One of the reasons for this is that, until now, alarm approaches haven’t taken a full account of process history and the natural richness of operation that a process can, and does, experience in response to differing external factors like feed and ambient temperature, changing demand and operations goals, as well as operation variability. The tedium of exploring years of process history for thousands of variables has made this impractical reasonably to explore.

This free webinar on Wednesday 17th and Thursday 18th August from Process Plant Computing Ltd (PPCL), will demonstrate a new method that leverages the parallel plot to give easy access to historic data in the context of desired plant operation as well as alarm and process limits for hundreds of variables at once. Bringing process history into the process allows alarm limits to be evaluated immediately while taking less time, as well as allowing continuous alarm review, finally breaking the cycle of periodic alarm rationalization.

Some examples on real systems will be included, as well as discussion some of the successes the company's users have had.